: Currently reading: France by Emile Chabal 📚
: Finished reading: Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant 📚
: Finished reading: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb. 📚 A truly …
: If you care about history, then you should consider subscribing to the newsletters Roy Rosenzweig …
: Friends: If you are interested in the history of the Bible in the United States, perhaps with a side …
: Currently reading: France: A History from Gaul to De Gaulle by John Julius Norwich 📚
: Finished reading: Making Judaism Safe for America by Jessica Cooperman 📚
: Finished reading: The Hag: The Life, Time, and Music of Merle Haggard by Marc Eliot 📚
: Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚
: Finished reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
: Finished reading: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze 📚
: New status board for my office door.
: I am a man more scheduled against than scheduling.
: Currently reading: Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about …
: In the three days before Christmas, I have been asked to review a tenure case, serve as an advisor …
: Looking forward to reading this one.
: Currently reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 📚
: Finished reading: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton 📚
: Over the next few days I’ll share some of the more interesting parts of America’s Public …
: I published a free, open-access book today. Called America’s Public Bible: A Commentary it …
: Currently reading: Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis by John …
: TIL that LaTeX and I were both released in the same year. A coincidence? I trow not.
: I was not at all sure whether I had done a good job teaching this new course this semester. But the …
: Our one requirement for guests at Thanksgiving, or other gatherings at our house: phones must be …
: A calendrical sea change A significant change—not much remarked on, from what I can tell—is the sea change in how Protestant …
: Thanks, @ayjay and @jaheppler, for checking out Mastodon for the rest of us and saving us some time. …
: Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
: Currently reading: The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein 📚
: Currently reading: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
: I like that each issue of the American Council of Learned Societies newsletter ends with a poem.
: Currently reading: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin 📚
: Beating the bounds of the elementary school We recently moved to a new house. My children’s elementary school has a tradition they call the …
: Cover for my digital book, to be published December 13. Posting this for you all on Micro.blog …
: Honest acknowledgements My children contributed nothing to this project, and if it were not for them, I would certainly …
: 6 y.o. playing white; 11 y.o. playing black. The 6y.o. was sure he was done for, but I told him to …
: This is a great pattern for a notebook. Ruled by default, but grid if you need it.
: Finished reading: Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past by …
: Currently reading: Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read …
: Currently reading: Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling by Eric …
: My colleagues have been creating software to transcribe structured historical data, which we call …
: The Green Tunnel podcast has released the trailer for season two on the history of the Appalachian …
: Finished reading: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn 📚
: Podcast on the history of American antisemitism R2 Studios at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has received a grant from the Luce …
: R2 Studios has a new website making it easier to find and subscribe to our historical, narrative …
: Here is my colleague John Turner, writing about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints …
: Currently reading: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized …
: Finished reading: Good Booty by Ann Powers 📚
: Finished reading: Country Music by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns 📚
: Essays interpreting pandemic collections Over the past couple years RRCHNM has partnered with many Jewish cultural heritage institutions to …
: Four guides to teaching religion and U.S. history with Library of Congress sources, from my …
: My friend and collaborator Kellen Funk and I are working on a set of research questions—mostly …
: One of the best parts of my job is being the coordinator for graduate students at the Roy Rosenzweig …
: Red Sox at Orioles. If you had told me when I booked these tickets months ago that the Orioles would …
: On the ramparts of Fort McHenry.
: Currently reading: The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music by Michael …
: This is not the ASCH you are looking for.
: We recently moved to a new house. I believe I will be able to make this working arrangement work.
: Currently reading: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins …
: Here is an amazing eighteenth-century devotional and illuminated manuscript that the Winterthur …
: A fun kids’ playground next to a municipal airport, where the kids can watch light planes take off …
: JBJ struck out one and got out of the inning allowing only one run. Which is better than every Red …
: Jackie Bradley Jr. is one of my favorite Red Sox players. Watching JBJ, a position player, pitch …
: My colleague and I submitted two grants today. Pretty wiped out.
: Currently reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen 📚
: Writing grants all this week. It occurs to me that as a historian I am a non-fiction writer, but …
: Currently reading: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary 📚
: In our most recent Religion @ RRCHNM newsletter, we feature Jannelle Legg’s …
: Pleasant walk beside the canal in Indianapolis.
: I wish there were a way to write a 1,500 word essay without first writing a 3,500 word essay and …
: I’m looking forward to attending the biennial conference hosted by Center for the Study of …
: Currently reading: Washington Gladden’s Church: The Minister Who Made Modern American …
: Currently reading: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow 📚
: My children love ribs more than anything, so I did the best I could with my humble kettle grill and …
: Congratulations to Kris Stinson, who has published his first article, “American Babel: History …
: Currently reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 📚
: Currently reading: A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural …
: It’s important to me that I have a place to put my “outtakes and scraps” when …
: After threatening to upend my digital life with their changes to GSuite, Google has backed down. My …
: Most recent issue of our “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter. Features a well-done …
: Okay, Micro.blog friends. What examples of popular musicians who made their best (or at least, very …
: What do you call a book “manuscript,” but for a book-length interactive scholarly work? Whatever you …
: Here is an excerpt from the development version of America’s Public Bible, showing how books …
: Working on final copyedits and proofreading for a project. One never finishes a project; one simply …
: Small family dinner to celebrate Abby signing on the dotted line to become assistant professor of …
: Currently reading: Cash: by the editors of Rolling Stone 📚
: Caroline Greer writes about what you can learn about the first community of Shakers in the U.S. from …
: The progress bar is not strictly necessary, but it does make one feel better.
: Thanks to my colleague, John Turner, a group of us from GMU got to take a tour of the Latter-day …
: Currently reading: A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino …
: Currently reading: I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, …
: What to do after Google Apps for Your Domain? Friends, I have been caught by the end of Google Apps for Your Domain, or whatever that program is …
: Pleased to learn that the Commonwealth of Virginia appears to have upgraded me from a Human Resource …
: Nice enough to work outside again.
: I have been a member of the American Society of Church History since graduate school, and every time …
: 📧 New issue of the “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter, featuring our most recent …
: My collaborators at RRCHNM (@chnm) recently started a newsletter: “American Religion @ …
: So far today I have gotten 26 spam phone calls, which is not typical. What is going on?
: The German Historical Institute and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are offering …
: This is definitely inside baseball, but here is a description of how @chnm runs our data-heavy …
: The 10 y.o.’s favorite song might be “Blue Suede Shoes.” She is intensely loyal to Carl Perkins and …
: Currently reading: Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick 📚
: Pleased beyond measure to have contributed to this documentary collection in honor of Jonathan Sarna …
: Currently reading: Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley 📚
: This Friday afternoon, two reader reports recommending publication for the large-ish digital …
: I rewrote a complicated Go program this afternoon, stripping out a major component, deleting 100 …
: Everybody complains about reviewer number two but sometimes reviewer number two has to install the …
: Playing 80 Days as a New Year’s Eve family game. 🎮
: Working some more on the text adventure game with the 10 y.o. Despite my explicit instructions that …
: My daughter and I have been writing a text adventure game for the ten-year-old set over the break. …
: Currently reading: A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman 📚
: Got a nice email from a fifth grader telling me that her class is using my map of slavery and that …
: Finished reading: The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by …
: I love the idea of character-based playlists for the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s one …
: Currently reading: The Resurrection of Johnny Cash by Graeme Thomson 📚
: Someone recently complained on GitHub, “You haven’t updated this package in three …
: I had no idea you could get a document camera for anything …
: Currently reading: History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi 📚
: No one cares about reproducible research (including me) until they need to run some research scripts …
: Parts of the DOI/CrossRef system are amazing. The XML responses in email … less so.
: I finished a longer (12K words) piece of writing yesterday and a shorter (2K words) one today. A …
: RRCHNM has cleaned up its back catalog of video on YouTube. There’s a lot of good history …
: ✉️ Working on It #11: The Stack.
: Ted Gioia designs and builds his home library.
: Earlier this year I got myself a proper stereo. My family had stereo equipment like this when I was …
: The kindergartner, the fifth grader, and the two professors are all packed up for the start of …
: A grandfather clock my daughter made out of legos.
: I’m very pleased with the Obsidian iOS app, which lets me get away from iCloud syncing and …
: Currently reading: Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith (Spiritual Lives) by Elesha J. Coffman 📚
: Delighted to see my friend Sam Lebovic’s new book available for pre-order: A Righteous …
: I left one meeting today by saying I had to go to my next appointment. My next appointment was …
: Right now I’m writing a crawler that discovers all the digitized text-based sources in the …
: This summer and fall I’m working with the amazing and fun folks at LC Labs on a project called …
: I’ve said it elsewhere, but probably not here on Micro.blog: I’m very glad that Jason …
: Currently reading: The Human Factor by Graham Greene 📚
: Currently reading: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.📚
: Currently reading: To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson. 📚
: Not as exciting as the title would indicate. And definitely not exciting once you log in.
: Current status: Johnny Cash, “The Beast in Me.”
: Currently reading: Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of …
: In 2017, I changed the topic of my digital methods class to Reconstruction. Twenty days before that …
: My internal monologue upon assigning the Gospel of Mark: “Hmm. Should I scan this reading for …
: I’m teaching The Global History of Christianity this semester. It is far and away my favorite …
: The most recent issue of my newsletter points you to two songs about death and breath. Johnny Cash …
: I put a photos widget on my phone, and everyday it turns up a half dozen picture like this one.
: My daughter made a genuine game, with a start screen and levels, all in Google Slides. You move a …
: 📰 Newsletter: Presbyterians—tabulated, visualized, and interpreted.
: Currently reading: Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. 📚
: Today’s task: remembering what in the world I was doing the last time I touched this project.
: Currently reading: Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. 📚
: Consider the lilies of the field.
: 9 y.o.: “Daddy, can I ask you a question.” Me: “Yes.” 9 y.o.: “Does anyone actually read …
: “To cast a free ballot ・A root of democracy”
: The 4 y.o. wrote this letter (without help!) to his grandparents, who could not come visit this …
: Currently reading: Religion and Profit: Moravians In Early America by Kate Carté. 📚
: Well, that’s one take on the Oxford Movement.
: I’m not 100% sure what it means to say “Democracy is the law of nature pervading the law of …
: Is it possible to be a low-level academic administrator without it killing your prose style? Asking …
: In the most recent issue of Working on It, I talk through how I revised a visualization to be as …
: This historian has been cited in an article titled “Dynamic courtship signals and mate …
: My daughter: “I’ve never understood why there is so much shouting at camps.” Emphasis on my …
: I can tell I’m a low-level chump because I try to write meaningful email subject lines. If you are …
: More appendices please Currently reading: The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power Of Evangelical Women Celebrities …
: I’ve had my own domain for fifteen years, but it only just now occurred to me: I should manage my …
: Currently reading: [Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless …
: The most bizarre pattern of spam emails that I get are Verizon Fios ads a couple times a week, …
: I assume that by forcing people to use Outlook and only Outlook as the client for email, my …
: It is a pleasure to write code in Go, because it really does hit that sweet spot of letting you be …
: As I contemplate five consecutive hours of Zoom meetings this afternoon, my soul dies a little, and …
: Editing audio for the first time, and the waveform below is what “uh and uh” looks like.
: The American Religious Ecologies project has released this interactive map of Roman Catholic …
: I’ve been making outlines of Lego figures for my son to color and cut out. We’ve made …
: No fig tree, but at least I can sit in peace under my own vines.
: What did the United States look like in 1860, only a half decade before Juneteenth? The enslavement …
: I’ve written a lot of talks. But this talk that I have to give soon is going to be a video …
: My wife saw me reading this book, and asked if she could read it when I was done. I told her I had …
: August 2014 and June 2020: the two moments where I had more bookshelf space than books.
: It is an awkward for someone with my first name to trust the governor of Virginia much more than the …
: The calculus of how best to game my caffeine consumption so as to be wired for an evening class and …
: One of my daughter’s homeschool assignments today was to identify the seven words from the cross in …
: From one of the psalms appointed for morning prayer today: My companions and neighbors you have put …
: Reading the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies schedules I’ve written a few blog posts over at the American Religious Ecologies blog, discussing the …
: My daughter got excited by her school spelling bee, so she and my wife have been making a podcast …
: Very disappointed that no one seems to have caught the reference implied by the “Conjoined Triangles …
: Two rules of thumb for making plots of change over time. It is usually more illuminating to plot …
: I believe it was Kohelet who said, “Of commenting on other people’s work, there is no end.”
: Helped my colleague and friend with his author website. The key to a good author website? Having …
: The Irishman = Casino + Forrest Gump + The Shootist
: End of the semester: time to put up the sign my daughter made for me.
: Hello, Micro.blog. I’m starting to write a newsletter, and the first issue is titled “Love letter to …
: Considering that I was a child in the nineties, you would think I would know something about …
: They Knew They Were Pilgrims My colleague John Turner’s book, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest …
: I discounted everyone’s complaints about bugginess in recent Apple software. But in the past …
: We recently released the website for RRCHNM’s American Religious Ecologies project. You can …
: When I decided to share my desktop’s screen to my laptop, I didn’t quite anticipate that …
: It’s a weird thing to type, to be sure.
: Congratulations to the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond for receiving the …
: The 8 y.o., who has just started chess club, is poised to win her first game since she is up a queen …
: If you are trying to upgrade your LaTeX installation on a Saturday morning just so you can send in …
: Writing my abstract today for this symposium on “Religion in Place: Spaces | Borders | Bodies” which …
: To be fair, history is hard.
: In honor of Labor Day, I give you these two images.
: Is it just me, or is it super weird that the Museum of the Bible would make a video about my …
: Team teaching Here’s a thought that occurred to me this week. I’ve read hundreds of scholarly books …
: It was a whirlwind first week of the semester. For two days I think I did literally nothing but talk …
: Here’s the syllabus (PDF) for American Scriptures, a class I teaching for the second time and …
: RRCHNM has published the second issue of Current Research in Digital History, a journal that …
: This is the week where I write to a dozen people asking when their work will be done, and a dozen …
: Syllabus for a class I’m teaching this fall.
: Length of time I used communication technology before being utterly exhausted with it: email: 15 …
: Any of you IndieWeb folk have a non-creepy alternative to Google Analytics?
: What’s the name for this law of the internet? All publishing venues sooner or later dispense …
: My two favorite peer review comments of all time are (1) that I am a “Catholic triumphalist” (if …
: Well, there’s your problem right there.
: Nothing makes me feel better as a teacher than to see a bunch of students who took a course with me …
: If you are a sysadmin interested in working in the DC-area, and if you value a free and open web …
: But if you think that lighthouse poem is cute, here is one she wrote for one of her stories. 😵
: A poem my daughter wrote as a birthday present for her grandmother.
: Starting to think in a serious way about classes for the fall. Here’s what’s on deck: …
: It is comforting to know that if I ever run out of ideas, I can redo my old work and call it “live …
: A fair number of people who aren’t my students or colleagues ask me for advice about digital …
: Now that the Red Sox are losing to the Orioles we can officially call this a bad season.
: Congratulations to GMU’s Jeri Wieringa, who completed her PhD today with her dissertation “A …
: Anyone who thinks the internet is an immaterial abstraction has never had to work on the internet in …
: In a turnabout of events, the 7 y.o. says we can’t go out to lunch yet because she is the one …
: Two hours to write the script in Go, which then takes two hours to run. Could have written the …
: Does anyone else mistakenly type terminal commands in iMessage threads to their loved ones?
: Have to agree with the Washington Post that the Museum of the Bible’s “sound shell” is pretty cool.
: Susan Schulten explains how maps were made during the Paris Peace process in the aftermath of WWI.
: My colleagues and I are working on digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. Or—I should …
: The most productive I’ve been as a writer was while writing dissertation and also watching my …
: What are you citizens of the free republic of Micro.blog using for an RSS reader these days? …
: Here is what some colleagues at RRCHNM and I will be working on next.
: It’s amusing to read all these articles about how you have to minify your markup and transpile your …
: The 3y.o. is pedantic about grammar and word choice and not shy about correcting anyone, but then, …
: Why is it that every humanities use of maps begins with a disclaimer that maps can tell lies? Is it …
: Called Hover. They picked up right away, and in two minutes I had the answer to my problem and it …
: In a twist on the usual “write my own blog engine before I write a blog post” story, …
: I really like the Spotify playlists for the characters on Halt and Catch Fire, like this one for …
: For unfathomable reasons, when you submit final grades they are listed as A, A+, A-, because you …
: For the past few years, colleagues at RRCHNM and I have been making maps of election returns to the …
: The 7 y.o. was amazed I had (and would wear) a shirt that is older than her.
: Software I used to love but now loathe: Jekyll Slack Software likely to head in that direction: …
: If you get the data model right, all the rest of the programming is so much easier. Get it wrong, …
: Making a Doodle poll. Q: What have I become? A: A middle manager.
: It’s my eleventh wedding anniversary and the last day of classes. Also, got tenured today.
: If you are on an Indie web platform like Micro.blog, then by definition you will be interested in …
: Church in the Wild Delighted to see Brett Grainger’s Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America in print. …
: There is a bug in Ruby (only on the Mac) that puts “the first shall be last and the last shall …
: NYU Press has added an open-access section called Open Square. I’m glad to see more academic …
: Illustrations for the Paschal Triduum From Maundy Thursday: From Good Friday: For Easter Sunday:
: I read @ayjay’s newsletter, then I read The Typewriter Revolution, and now I am looking for a green …
: A tribute to my departed colleague Marion Deshmukh (1945–2019), who was a professor in my department …
: The chart on “quality of question” vs “strength of evidence” in Roger Peng’s blog post about the …
: We are all tacitly agreeing not to ask one another to do anything new between now and the end of the …
: For a few months I’ve listened almost entirely to music and not podcasts. I am returning to …
: My rules for giving talks. Make the audience—not yourself—look smart. Entertain, then educate. End …
: A gift from my emeritus colleague at lunch yesterday.
: My phone number is still from my home town, where I haven’t lived since 2006 and where I don’t know …
: I played chess with the 7 y.o. yesterday. After she captured both my bishops, she said, “No more …
: Almost all airports make Dulles look bad, but the Indianapolis airport in particular makes Dulles …
: At the Metro on a laptop tethered to a cell phone, SSHing into the workstation into my office, then …
: How many monitors does a person need? Answer: Just one more.
: Looking forward to having ten historians representing eight projects come this Friday to …
: How a team of researchers is “Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of ECCO.” That’s published in …
: The workshop on quantitative history that Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan hosted this past week at …
: There are lies, damn lies, and text messages from United saying they “value your time.”
: Amazon is serving me ads that say “Make this your holiest Lent." So I guess targeted …
: My colleague Mills Kelly on his work tracing the history of the Appalachian Trail, starting here in …
: Now that my department’s two job searches are over I feel like I can get this semester and my …
: Some of my colleagues are deeply gifted at commenting on draft work, and I always feel inadequate to …
: Gimlet Media didn’t make podcasting, but they certainly helped popularize it. Now with their …
: Emma Green reviewing Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: Fifty-five years after the passage of …
: Both Happy Feet and Smallfoot have the same religious plot elements—plot elements that could have …
: Nashville Union and American, 11 May 1875.
: Went looking for the PDF of my book which had gone missing. It was in the directory “Desktop > …
: Had my customary start of the semester spat with the copy machine. If copiers were the dominant …
: Syllabus for “Computational History.”
: Semi-annual shoutout to Caleb McDaniel’s Generic Syllabus Maker.
: Draft syllabus for Global History of Christianity.
: Incredible that a five hundred page reader in the history of Christianity can contain exactly two …
: Robin Jensen’s new history of The Cross is an addition to my syllabus this semester. It’s my attempt …
: People, let me plead with you: your academic event does not need to be longer than one day. Unless …
: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” should have been my auto-reply when trying to schedule …
: Grant submitted. That makes three this academic year so far.
: I’ve only been using Notion for about a week, but my cautious, reserved opinion is that it is …
: At ASCH in Chicago, I was on a panel with Shirley Mullen, whom I had never met. After a few minutes …
: True, fixing up my blog page was definitely not the most important thing I had to do today. But …
: Just as numismatics is a well-defined field, in future millennia archeologists will be able to date …
: This is hard to explain, but I had a keyboard/monitor plugged into a computer running Ubuntu, and …
: Fifty-six proposals for our workshops and special issue with the Journal of Social History. …
: Current status: recreational finding of studs.
: “My next two book projects” is the new “my next book project.”
: Happy belated birthday, Philip Schaff, born January 1, 1819, and founder of the American Society of …
: If you are at the AHA, check out this panel on “Lessons Learned from Three Digital Dissertations in …
: Tim Larsen’s religious biography of J. S. Mill for the Spiritual Lives series he edits at …
: Pro tip for collaboration: Don’t update the axis legends on your visualizations from variable …
: American religious history is everywhere. But sometimes it shows up in the public library parking …
: Helping family with their computers that do not have ad blockers installed has reacquainted me with …
: A collect for the Holy Innocents. We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of …
: Converts and perverts What is the reciprocal term for a religious convert? You could use prepositions, as we do now, to …
: Thanks, American Academy of Religion. Framing this is not something I would have ever done for …
: Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan are hosting a workshop on “Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn …
: My preference for having one obvious, correct way to do things without fuss and working in …
: There are about 230,000 of these schedules from the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies in the National …
: I learned the word stanine today. Who says standardized testing isn’t educational?
: The most surprising thing about being an academic has been how much of the job is evaluating other …
: I am unduly excited to be teaching “The Global History of Christianity” again next …
: It seems likely that nothing I will ever create will get more readers or users than this map of …
: The “Yes, Yes, No" segment in Episode #131 of Reply All is a brilliant example of close …
: I guess there was twice as much Christianity in the twentieth century.
: Waiting for DNS to propagate, so the internet is already more fun.
: Trying to make the internet fun again. Going to give micro.blog a try, mostly because people whose …